Make no mistake, the Saints' historically-heinous performance on defense this season has been indefensible. So it's impossible to dismiss even the more extreme suggestions from growing pockets of a frustrated fan base to either fire coordinator Steve Spagnuolo, dump many veteran players, change the scheme or do all of the above.

The much more difficult task, however, is trying to offer a promising solution - either in the short term or the long term.

There isn't much light at the end of this tunnel. The Saints are staring at some huge salary-cap constraints heading into 2013, which will make an extreme makeover extremely difficult.

ESPN's John Clayton, one of the best in the business at crunching salary-cap numbers, projects the Saints at $16.1 million over the cap next year. And after the Saints back-loaded so many of their new and restructured contracts this past offseason, I did a breakdown that showed the combined salary-cap figures of 10 of their highest-priced players will leap from $37.1 million this year to $85.4 million next year.

So even if the Saints release expensive veterans like Will Smith, Jonathan Vilma and David Hawthorne and choose not to re-sign free agents like Sedrick Ellis, Scott Shanle and Turk McBride, they still won't be able to afford many high-priced replacements.

The draft also won't offer much immediate help to the defense in 2013. As of now, they are slated to lose their second-round draft pick as part of the NFL's bounty sanctions, unless the league decides to reconsider that penalty.

So for the rest of this season and beyond, the Saints will have to rely most heavily on the men they've already invested in -- guys like Spagnuolo, middle linebacker Curtis Lofton, safeties Roman Harper and Malcolm Jenkins, cornerbacks Jabari Greer and Patrick Robinson, end Cameron Jordan and tackle Brodrick Bunkley. They'll also rely on the development of young players with potential like ends Junior Galette and Martez Wilson, tackle Akiem Hicks and cornerback Corey White.

That will be the core of this defense as they attempt to clean up this mess. And there is some bona fide talent in there. The No. 1 fix they can make is simply playing better and executing more consistently - no matter what scheme they're running.

That's especially true for the rest of this season. As assistant head coach Joe Vitt and Spagnuolo have said, they don't have any "pixie dust" or "magic wand" that will solve these issues.

And the idea of drastically changing schemes midseason could be even uglier than what we've seen so far.

"I think with the veteran coaches (like) Chuck Knox, Dick Vermeil, Ted Marchibroda, if you have dramatic changes and you have radical changes, that's when panic sets in," Vitt said. "All of a sudden you're going to create a scheme that you have not worked on in OTAs, that you have not worked on in training camp ... If you put that panic in, the players can smell the house burning before the match is ever lit. We've got to play better, we've got to coach better, we've got to execute better. That's not the type of coaching that I was brought up in.

"That being said, if we think that we can do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result, that's the definition of insanity. Every week we're going to have new wrinkles, we're going to have a couple of auxiliary fronts, we're going to have a couple of auxiliary looks, but we're not going to rewrite the play book."

Should the Saints have seen this disaster coming? Maybe some of it, but not to this epic level.

Obviously, they knew the drastic switch from former coordinator Gregg Williams' man-coverage scheme to Spagnuolo's zone-coverage scheme would require an adjustment period. And they knew that the defensive line would struggle to get consistent pressure on quarterbacks without blitzing as much as they had in the past.

But chances are, no one expected so many repeat offenses in fundamental areas like missed tackles, taking bad angles in the run game and getting torched in the secondary for deep balls. Even corners like Robinson and Greer, who used to play almost every down in man-to-man coverage, have been less consistent when they get matched up one on one.

As a result, even when Spagnuolo has decided to throw in more blitzes, the Saints have just gotten burned even worse when the coverage hasn't held up on the back end. And when he drops more guys in coverage, they're getting gashed in the run game. They've been damned if they do and damned if they don't.

Those are the kind of things that must get fixed immediately and that players remain confident they can fix, even without taking drastic measures.

"I don't think we need to blow up anything," Lofton said. "I'm fine with the players we have. ... I don't think the scheme doesn't fit us. But at the same time, we're not playing together and executing as we need to be doing.

"I think the thing that's hurting us most is when you have 10 guys doing it right, one guy doing it wrong. That hurts the whole defense. Then people are like, 'Oh the scheme is horrible.' Or you've got nine people doing it right and two people doing it wrong, it makes everything look bad."

Smith echoed that sentiment.

"I don't believe in just giving up and abandoning ship. I don't believe in that. I believe you try to fix the problems," Smith said. "We all know we've got terrific players here."

And Shanle expanded on that notion.

"When I look around, I see a lot of the same faces here who won 40-some games over three years," Shanle said. "I know the easy thing to do is to say, 'Well, it's just the d-coordinator or it's the talent.'

"I guess only time will tell (how the Saints management decides to address the problems). That's not my decision to make. All I can do is, the way I look at it, I'm employee No. 58. I do what I'm told, how I'm told. ... All we can do is keep trying to get better and see what happens from here on out."

There are some small reasons for optimism. The Saints do have some proven talent on their roster, they've got to be getting more and more familiar with Spagnuolo's scheme every week, and they were showing some signs of improvement up until last week's blowout 34-14 loss to the Denver Broncos, in which they gave up a season-high 530 yards.

At the very least, they've got to have faith that the Denver game was rock-bottom. And there's only one direction they can go from there.